Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures.

• Author: Chavalas, Mark W.

Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures. Edited by SETH L. SANDERS. Oriental Institute Seminars, vol. 2. Chicago: THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE, 2006. Pp. xi + 300, illus. $24.95.

Originating in an Oriental Institute Symposium, "Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures: Unofficial Writing in the Ancient Near East and Beyond" (25-26 February 2005), this collection of papers provides stimulating and provocative food for thought concerning the politics of writing in the ancient Near East. Bemoaning the disconnect between cultural anthropology and ancient Near Eastern studies, Seth Sanders has not only brought together a diverse selection of scholars of the ancient Near East, but also linguists and anthropologists to study the political power of language once it has taken on a written form. The participants were especially concerned with examining the relationships between written and spoken language, between language and ethnicity, between national and marginal languages, between state formation and national identity, and that of the history of writing and history itself.

The book is divided into three parts, or panels, entitled, "Institutions," "Publics," and "Cosmopolitan and Vernacular." Each panel includes a lengthy response to the papers included in the section. After the introductory chapter (Sanders, "Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures"), the first panel includes articles by John Kelly ("Writing and the State: China, India, and General Definitions"), Gonzalo Rubio ("Writing in Another Tongue: Alloglottography in the Ancient Near East"), and Jacco Dieleman ("Abundance in the Margins: Multiplicity of Script in the Demotic Magical Papyri"), with a response by Jerrold Cooper. The second panel contains articles by Christopher Woods ("Bilingualism, Scribal Learning, and the Death of Sumerian"), Annick Payne ("Multilingual Inscriptions and Their Audiences: Cilica and Lydia"), and William Schniedewind ("Aramaic, the Death of Written Hebrew, and Language Shift in the Persian Period"), with a response by Michael Silverstein. Sanders then includes a paper not delivered at the original seminar, a supplement by Piotr Michalowski ("The Lives of the Sumerian Language"). The last panel contains articles by Paul-Alain Beaulieu ("Official and Vernacular Languages: The Shifting Sands of Imperial and Cultural Identities in First-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia"), Theo van den Hout ("Institutions, Vernaculars, Publics: The Case of Second-millennium Anatolia"), and...